scholarly journals Fairy Tale Femininities: A Discourse Analysis of Snow White Films 1916-2012

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lisbet Rosa Dam

<p>Fairy tales are enduring cultural texts that have enjoyed wide appeal and the continuing popularity of the fairy tale can be seen in the recent proliferation of media employing fairy tale narratives. Fairy tales provide a site of meaning about femininity and masculinity and examining them over time identifies versions of gender that are prized or denigrated within specific social, historical moments. This project was interested in the continuities and divergences in these gendered discourses across time. Although there has been considerable academic interest in fairy tales and gender, few studies have approached the topic from a genealogical perspective. This research extends the current literature through a genealogical analysis of five Snow White films from 1916 to 2012 in addition to incorporating an analysis in relation to a contemporary postfeminist, neoliberal social climate. The research employed a feminist poststructuralist framework and utilised thematic and genealogical Foucauldian discourse analysis to analyse the data. Discursive analyses found enduring discourses of traditional femininity across the films which centrally organised around a binary construction of femininity as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ A moral discourse worked to construct ‘good’ femininity as prized and bad femininity as punished. Alongside persistent discourses of femininity, however, a newer postfeminist femininity was evident in recent versions of the fairy tale. Consistent with a postfeminist, neoliberal discourse that highlights the importance of the body, analyses found an increased emphasis on beauty and the vast effort required to maintain it. Another postfeminist shift in the tale was the invoking of a girl power discourse to construct Snow as a competent fighter and leader. However, the complex entanglement of discourses of femininity in contemporary society is highlighted by the co-existence of these newer versions of femininity with traditional goals such as achieving a ‘happily ever after.’ From the perspective of possibilities for subjectivity, these shifts in representation appear to offer a young female audience more empowered possibilities of femininity but such power is simultaneously constrained by a complex amalgamation with traditional ‘niceness’ and beauty.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lisbet Rosa Dam

<p>Fairy tales are enduring cultural texts that have enjoyed wide appeal and the continuing popularity of the fairy tale can be seen in the recent proliferation of media employing fairy tale narratives. Fairy tales provide a site of meaning about femininity and masculinity and examining them over time identifies versions of gender that are prized or denigrated within specific social, historical moments. This project was interested in the continuities and divergences in these gendered discourses across time. Although there has been considerable academic interest in fairy tales and gender, few studies have approached the topic from a genealogical perspective. This research extends the current literature through a genealogical analysis of five Snow White films from 1916 to 2012 in addition to incorporating an analysis in relation to a contemporary postfeminist, neoliberal social climate. The research employed a feminist poststructuralist framework and utilised thematic and genealogical Foucauldian discourse analysis to analyse the data. Discursive analyses found enduring discourses of traditional femininity across the films which centrally organised around a binary construction of femininity as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ A moral discourse worked to construct ‘good’ femininity as prized and bad femininity as punished. Alongside persistent discourses of femininity, however, a newer postfeminist femininity was evident in recent versions of the fairy tale. Consistent with a postfeminist, neoliberal discourse that highlights the importance of the body, analyses found an increased emphasis on beauty and the vast effort required to maintain it. Another postfeminist shift in the tale was the invoking of a girl power discourse to construct Snow as a competent fighter and leader. However, the complex entanglement of discourses of femininity in contemporary society is highlighted by the co-existence of these newer versions of femininity with traditional goals such as achieving a ‘happily ever after.’ From the perspective of possibilities for subjectivity, these shifts in representation appear to offer a young female audience more empowered possibilities of femininity but such power is simultaneously constrained by a complex amalgamation with traditional ‘niceness’ and beauty.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-45
Author(s):  
Irina Olegovna Loginova ◽  
Sergei Gennadievich Vakhrushev ◽  
Irina Olegovna Kononenko ◽  
Nina Nikolaevna Vishnyakova ◽  
Yuliya Sergeevna Sergeevna ◽  
...  

Aim. In modern medical and psychological literature, the importance of reducing stress during medical examination of children is explained by the ambivalent characteristics of the modern technological approach: on the one hand, it gives more accurate data on the status of the body, on the other hand, it acts as an additional stressor. This work demonstrates the possibilities of reducing stress during ENT diagnosis in children aged from 3 to 7 years by means of play endoscopy. Materials and methods. Children from 3 to 7 years of age requiring ENT endoscopy (n=30) participated in the study. All children were divided into 2 groups by the pair distribution function. The first group was offered a play endoscopy. Play endoscopy is an ENT endoscopy performed with endoscopic equipment provided with a fairy-tale character (hereinafter the product). Play endoscopy is carried out to reduce stress during consultation and examination (patent application No 2020104836). The second group of children was offered a traditional endoscopic examination. The research was conducted on the premises of the New Technologies Clinic. Results. In the first group, 13% of children showed signs of stress during ENT endoscopy, while in the second group there were 53% of stressed children. In the first group (15 children), 13 children without prevalence of any syndrome chose bright products corresponding to age and gender. Children in the second group were not offered play products. Conclusion. A comprehensive examination of a child requires an increase in the humanitarian component of the treatment process. The method of play endoscopy based on the selection of a toy with its subsequent use with endoscopic equipment has shown its effectiveness. Wider application of this technique for reducing stress in children aged from 3 to 7 years may be the subject of further research.


Author(s):  
Marina Warner

Princes and queens, palaces and castles dominate the foreground of a fairy tale, but through the gold and glitter, the depth of the scene is filled with vivid and familiar circumstances, as the fantastic faculties engage with the world of experience. ‘Potato soup: true stories/real life’ explains that the genre’s themes are real-life themes and the passions real-life passions. The situations in fairy tales also capture deep terrors of occurrences common and, mercifully, uncommon. Despite the historical origins behind stories such as Bluebeard and Snow White, fairy tales, in general, dramatize ordinary circumstances. They are messages of hope arising from desperate yet ordinary situations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Restu Dedy Hendriyanto ◽  
Yusuf Kurniawan

Gender representation is one of the most prominent subjects of discussion in American society. Fairy tales as one of the first cultural products consumed by the American society are a medium with an influential presence in the issue. They provide gender representations and convey the idea of masculine and feminine- myths of how to be men and women. However, in 20th century, many movies are changing the perspective by presenting women and action and break the traditional myth. In the same year, a movie entitled Snow White and the Huntsman appears as the remake of the written fairy tale Snow White in the form of an action-adventure movie. To move the discussion further, this research examines how the idea of women as victims of violence in the movie is maintained. A number of disciplines in the forms of theory and approach are used to analyze the data. It also applies gender theories and Barthes's semiotic theory in answering the research question. As a result, it is found that the character Snow White and a number of other women characters still become victims of violence. The representations are also still associated with the traditional ideas of women. 


2021 ◽  
Vol 84 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Priyanka Banerjee ◽  
◽  
Rajni Singh ◽  

While heteronormativity remained at the core of the classic fairy tale, a queer subtext existed in the form of subtle symbolic codes. By reflecting the changing socio- cultural discourses about sexuality and gender in time, the representation of queer sexuality in fairy tales has also developed. This paper attempts a queer reading of the revisioning of Madame Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” in Emma Donoghue’s “The Tale of the Rose” and the 2017 Disney version. This paper demonstrates how Emma Donoghue’s adaptation deconstructs the heteronormativity of Beaumont’s tale by dismantling the binaries of Beauty/Beast and man/woman and represents queer sexuality and desire through multi-layered language. This paper also examines how in the Disney version the story takes a new dimension in close proximity to twenty-first century media culture and lends itself to queer interpretation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-37
Author(s):  
Francisco José Cortés Vieco

AbstractJane Eyre never-endingly mesmerizes readers and scholars alike thanks to its fairy-tale echoes, but Charlotte Brontë also wrote this novel as a tale of her own myth-making about two fairies: Jane and Edward Rochester, because only fairylands of fantasy and daydreaming might empower an unprotected woman in Victorian times. This article explores Jane Eyre’s life journey and life-writing as if she were a fairy. She begins as a changeling child who torments malevolent adults and consoles herself in fairy tales. When Jane becomes a woman, whose fairy wings of rebelliousness and freedom cannot be torn by social rules or by any mortal, she is eventually crowned by her fairy godmother – Charlotte Brontë – with the diadem of love and gender equality as Titania, a queen in her own right, who chooses to marry her Oberon: Rochester.


2020 ◽  
Vol 202 ◽  
pp. 07053
Author(s):  
Fajria Noviana

Gender at root is a system of inequality that is founded on cultural beliefs about status differences between men and women. Women usually became the one who are disadvantaged in a relatively similar-situated men. This paper discusses the gender inequality upon women that can be found in Japanese fairy tales that have female main character entitled Kaguyahime and Tsuru no Ongaeshi. Fairy tales chosen as the object of this study because as a traditional story that is told from generation to generation, fairy tales are able to absorb aspects of life found in the supporting community groups, both in the form of social problems, ethics, and others. The results of feminist literary criticism on the object f this study are that both of the fairy tales has four forms of the gender inequality acts toward women, which are marginalization, subordination, stereotyping, and gender-related violence; and none of them has the double workload form. This could be due to the fact that when this fairy tale made, there were none of any women’s activities are performed in the public sphere, as well as being a housewife in their domestic sphere.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 135-151
Author(s):  
Kamila Kowalczyk

Transformation of fairy tales patterns in children’s literature available on the contemporary publishing marketWhat the contemporary publishing market offers the youngest readers are texts that make various forms of fairy tale characters — a  strongly representative group among them consists of texts that are transformations of fairy tale patterns that are deeply rooted in the mass imaginations including children’s imagination, which promote a  new version of a  well-known story: fairy tale renarrations. Such texts not only constitute evidence of changes in the fairy tale genre, but also prove the continuous updates on fairy tales. The aim of the article is to present and discuss how the authors modify specific characteristics of the fairy tale and play with its tradition. The examples of recognizable fairy tale patterns that are deeply rooted in the culture Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella were used to present the primary mechanisms of use and modification of fairy tales in children’s literature on the post-2000 Polish publishing market.The description of intertextual relationships between the fairy tale patterns and their renarrations renarration mechanisms has been supplemented with an analysis of influence of popular culture on children’s literature interpenetrating of cultural and literary circulations and the fashion for fairy tales. The studied works include those that have been written with gender education in mind, promotion of knowledge on rights of a  child or the environment and those primary aim of which is to entertain the young audience through reading. The article is also an encouragement to reflection on the genealogy of contemporary fairy tales and the shape, in which the “children’s fabulous fairy-tale-sphere” functions, and the factors that influence it.


Nordlit ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rikke Schubart

This article focuses on the figure of an aging and powerful witch pitted against younger women in three contemporary fairy-tale movie adaptations: Snow White and the Huntsman (dir. Rupert Sanders, 2012), Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (dir. Tommy Wirkola, 2013), and Maleficent (dir. Robert Stromberg, 2014). Each film transforms the aging witch from stock villain to a more nuanced character. This revision is intriguing for its concern with power and gender and for a reflection of contemporary debates about age and power within so-called wave feminism. The article uses two frames. The first is feminism and ageism, focusing on wave feminism and aging, and the second is the trope of the witch, drawing from fairy-tale studies, social history, and social anthropology. The article reads conflict between an aging witch and a young woman as a clash of feminist waves, and the witch’s ‘monstrosity’ as her refusal to be sidelined in a world obsessed with youth.


2019 ◽  
pp. 101-110
Author(s):  
Shiri Rosenberg

The article presents an analysis of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels as modern literary fairy-tales. To this end, the discussion will refer to structuralist critics, and identify “narrative functions” from folktales (stock images and episodes, stock character functions, characteristic sequences of episodes), used by Meyer in her vampire novels. As it turns out, Meyer modified folklore material to sustain a long and variously themed narrative: by embedding numerous subplots, by rearranging functions between characters, and creating composite and collective characters that combine contradictory functions. The author transformed several folktales into a series of four novels about coming of age in the twenty-first-century United States. A detailed analysis of Meyer’s modifications of the folktale partially corroborates the feminist critique of Meyer’s representation of the protagonists as reinforced versions of cultural stereotypes and gender roles. However, some transformations, especially Meyer’s assignment of the hero-function to the female protagonist Bella, seem to suggest just the opposite, thus leading to the conclusion that the Twilight novels reflect the confusion caused by contradictory role-models and aspirations, the confusion that seems to be inherent in a coming-of-age novel.


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